Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Tag: controversy
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I note that recently this blog has been getting a more political bent, but I’m trying to avoid it with a recent flurry of role-playing/fantasy related posts. I fully intend to restrict the political analysis to a) health-related stuff, b) stuff I can apply stats to and c) very occasional commentary on really big stuff.…
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We just had a national election in Australia. As I have done for every other election, I held an election party, this time sans-partner (who was in Oz), and sans-Australians (since I was in Japan). It was attended by an Iranian, two Japanese, one Australian, an American and a Thai. So, it seems I should…
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So previously I mentioned that I don’t think the Tory’s reforms of the NHS will work, and there was a bit of discussion (well, me waffling, really) about alternative models. Today via the Guardian I discovered this gem of a website, in which the Treasury has put up a list of suggestions that British people…
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I’m going out for a drink now. I spent much of this afternoon and evening trying to install Linux on a PowerPC iBook G4. The only reason I’m doing this is that I thought it might be nimbler than mac os 10.4. We use this iBook purely for watching movies (it’s plugged into the tv)…
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The release of the wikileaks data on the “secret story” of Afghanistan has led to a frenzy of the usual shallow reportage one comes to expect of the media, and nowhere more shallow than in the sensational finding that death rates of coalition soldiers have increased over the last 7 years. The Guardian even has…
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I’m not the first person to have considered the possibility that Paul the Octopus is the spawn of Cthulhu, based on his “remarkable” predictive powers. However, being unconvinced, I presented the possibility that he is not a normal octopus to my students last week, as an example of a basic non-parametric test (the runs test).…
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I don’t usually open up this blog to political debate, but my only commenter has been challenging me over the “incompetence” of the Australian Home Insulation Program recently, so I thought I’d try my statistical skills at investigating it, given that I’ve already used them so effectively to prove that all British people are ignorant.…
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So, that festival of the boot is on again, and although since I moved to Europe my interest in soccer has waned considerably[1], I still watch the World Cup quite avidly. Of the 6 European soccer giants – Spain, Italy, Germany, England, France and Holland – only 4 made it to the round of 16,…
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It’s a pretty well-established fact that role-playing games aren’t exactly popular with women, and neither are the related nerdy activities of computer gaming or board gaming. Recent studies suggest that about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 MMO players is female. That’s a better ratio than at my kickboxing club, where it’s about 1…
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You’ve done it! 120 years after the introduction of the Bismarck system, a mere 60 years after the foundation of the National Health Service, 40 years after you put a man on the moon, and a mere 35 years since Australia introduced Medibank, you finally have a system of universal health coverage. Welcome to civilisation[1]!…
Compromise and Conceit 